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Sessions & Content

Do you wonder about SSIS performance? Well I do, and I've compiled my research into this session. We'll cover various design patterns for solving common problems like inserts vs. updates, is it faster to use a lookup, or can you just catch the errors and process them afterwards? As well as the richer patterns we'll look at some straight comparisons between two components that can be used to do perform the same task and ask which one is quicker?

This session will investigate using Stream Insight, SQL Server and Analysis Services to provide an example framework to monitor cube usage as well as suggest a mechanism for highlighting areas for performance and security enhancements.

Fast Track is a new reference data warehousing architecture provided by Microsoft. More than this it represents a new way of thinking about data warehousing. A Fast Track system is measured by its raw compute power - not by a DBAs ability to tune an index. Fast Track is an appliance-like solution that delivers phenomenal performance from a pre-defined, balanced configuration of CPU, memory and storage using nothing but commodity hardware.
Of particular interest in a Fast Track system is the way in which the storage and SQL Server are configured. To achieve the fantastic throughput without using SSDs requires some careful configuration. This configuration is designed to make use of Sequential I/O to dramatically improve disk I/O performance.
Interested? If you have a large data warehouse that's seen better days or perhaps you are about to embark on a new warehousing project then you should be! Fast Track is a great solution with a fantastic value proposition.
In this one hour session we'll aim to get under the skin of Fast Track and get some answers as to how it delivers such great throughput on commodity hardware. In the process we'll aim to answer the following questions:
* When might I need Fast Track?
* What is Sequential I/O?
* How does Sequential I/O improve performance?
* What do I need to do to get Sequential I/O?
* How can I monitor for Sequential I/O ?
* What may I need to change in my ETL to get the benefit of sequential I/O?
Still reading? I'll save you a front row seat....

Encapsulating common code in fucntions is one of the first things you learn as a programmer. However with SQL Server functions can be very bad for performance. In this session we will examine scalar functions in both TSQL and in .Net.
You will come away from this session understanding the pitfalls of TSQL functions and how you can make them run 100 times faster.

In this session with examples we will cover how to identify inefficiencies in parallel query execution. We will also investigate some invisible symptoms!
Keywords: MAXDOP, CXPACKET, SLEEP_TASK & SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD.
I don’t have a quad core laptop yet, so I will do the best with my dual core!

Bad performance is often systemic of poor queries which are systemic of bad schema design which is systemic of non-relational thinking which is systemic of project time constraints and lack of understanding of Database Design. In this talk/tutorial I'll work my way through Normalisation, we'll look at the Relation Model and how to think in sets - it's very important; throughout I'll be referring to Codd and Date's teachings. Theory aside I'll do all my demonstrations in SQL Server - concurrency, indexing, good T-SQL practices and advice.

This session will cover how and why you should configure tempdb, how to troubleshoot tempdb issues, and how to detect, resolve, and mitigate allocation contention issues by creating multiple data files, optimizing temporary object reuse, and using trace flag 1118.

Learn to love SCOM!
Out of the box the SCOM Management Pack for SQL Server is not popular with DBA's. This demo based session will take you through the process of how you can extend SCOM to properly monitor and analyse SQL performance. Ultimately providing performance management scorecards and dashboards for your CIO.

If you've ever needed to review large Performance Monitor (PerfMon) logs and find problems quickly - you'll know how time consuming it can be to identify problems.
Performance Analysis for Logs (PAL) is a great tool to quickly highlight performance problems - taking the leg-work out of PerfMon log analysis.

This session will reveal the basics of analyzing crash-dumps in order to troubleshoot SQL Server crashes or abnormal situations. We will also review the postmortem analysis of common (but tricky) development problems, such as connection leaks, using WinDbg and Adplus.

MDX Studio can be used to analyze complex MDX expressions, monitor performance characteristics of MDX queries and get insight into how MDX interacts with other UDM features such as attribute relationships.

This session aims to enlighten the audience on improving Log file design, implementation and management for extracting maximum performance from SQL Server using real world examples and strategy. The session will focus on SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL 2008 R2.